Divine Goodness

Of late, I've been reading. Nothing new.

My mind has been engaged in a range of literary material including the Problem of Pain and Miracles by C.S Lewis, the book of Job, the Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder (second time through), the Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Understanding People by Larry Crabb, Good Living, a couple of odd magazines, and recently I've added the Good Women of China by Xinran to the collection.

I spent the better half of this evening reading the Problem of Pain and the chapter on Divine Goodness.

Here are some worthy quotes.

"Beyond all doubt, His idea of 'goodness' differs from ours; but you need have no fear that, as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral standards. When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the change demanded of you is in the direction you already call 'better'".

"The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluable so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word 'love', and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake..... To ask that God's love should be contented with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled, by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us loveable.... What we would here and now call our 'happiness' is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy."

Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to his demand, our conformity to his desire to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being. I do not deny, of course, that on a certain level we may rightly speak of the soul's search for God, and of God's receptive of the soul's love: but in the long run the soul's search for God can only be a mode or appearance of His search for her."